SUPREME COURT RULES FED MUST RELEASE ALL BAILOUT DATA
by ilene - March 21st, 2011 9:44 pm
Courtesy of The Daily Bail
Video – The Fed has 5 days to release all data.
March 21 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve must disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view. The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg.
A huge win for transparency.
Statement from Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News:
As a financial crisis developed in 2007, "The Federal Reserve forgot that it is the central bank for the people of the United States and not a private academy where decisions of great importance may be withheld from public scrutiny. The Fed must be accountable to Congress, especially in disclosing what it does with the people’s money."
“The board will fully comply with the court’s decision and is preparing to make the information available,” said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed.
The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.
“I can’t recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information” in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Continue reading at Bloomberg…
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Supreme Court: Corporations Can Buy Judges
by ilene - September 9th, 2010 10:40 pm
See also Citizens United Case – Corporate Campaign Contributions - my take on Citizens United. – Ilene
Supreme Court: Corporations Can Buy Judges
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
You’ve heard that a recent Supreme Court decision said that corporations can give unlimited funds to politicians.
But did you realize that it said that corporations can give unlimited money to judges?
As William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – pointed out last week:
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allows businesses to make unlimited political contributions to judges and politicians. When judges are elected, the need for these contributions inherently turns judges into politicians. Sympathetic judges are corrupt businesses’ most valuable allies. Corporations and their senior officials can commit civil or criminal wrongs with impunity if their case is assigned to a friendly judge. The Robber Barons often had judges on their payrolls. Judges can serve a corporation as both a shield and a sword. They can declare statutes and regulations unlawful. They can issue favorable decisions when corporations sue their critics, which can intimidate, tie up, or even bankrupt the critics.
The fact that corporations are “investing” so heavily in getting pro-business judges elected demonstrates that their CEOs believe that the election of friendly judges will increase their incomes and decrease the risk that they will ever be sanctioned. It’s a business decision – not a decision based on which judicial candidate would be more qualified or better serve justice. CEOs want to win cases when doing so would be unjust and contrary to the law, which is why they hire top attorneys and make the contributions necessary to elect judges they believe will be allies. The empirical evidence in Texas shows that judicial elections and contributions produces perverse dynamics. One study showed that hiring the former law firm of a Texas Supreme Court justice markedly increased the chances that the Texas Supreme Court would exercise its discretion and hear your appeal from an adverse decision. Hiring the former law firm of the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court produced an even greater chance of having one’s appeal heard.
As Yves Smith noted recently:
A Mother Jones article, “Permission to Encroach the Bench,” (hat tip reader Francois T) discusses how already big ticket battles
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TLP: About F#^king Time
by ilene - July 14th, 2010 11:25 am
TLP: About F#^king Time
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Yeah, but what about intentional f-bombs?
NYT:
A federal appeals court struck down a Federal Communications Commission policy on indecency Tuesday, saying that regulations barring the use of “fleeting expletives” on radio and television violated the First Amendment because they were vague and could inhibit free speech.
The decision, which many constitutional scholars expect to be appealed to the Supreme Court, stems from a challenge by Fox, CBS and other broadcasters to the F.C.C.’s decision in 2004 to begin enforcing a stricter standard of what kind of language is allowed on free, over-the-air television.
The stricter policy followed several incidents that drew widespread public complaint, including Janet Jackson’s breast-baring episode at the 2004 Super Bowl and repeated instances of profanity by celebrities, including Cher, Paris Hilton and Bono, during the live broadcasts of awards programs. The Janet Jackson incident did not involve speech but it drew wide public outrage that spurred a crackdown by the F.C.C.
In a unanimous three-judge decision, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said that the F.C.C.’s current policy created “a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here” because it left broadcasters without a reliable guide to what the commission would find offensive.
The appeals court emphasized that it was not precluding federal regulation of broadcast standards. “We do not suggest that the F.C.C. could not create a constitutional policy,” the court said. “We hold only that the F.C.C.’s current policy fails constitutional scrutiny.”
So the court gives the FCC a fleeting "F" for FAIL. And the best part is that the judges totally let loose with all kinds of profanity in the ruling.
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Rule by the Rich
by ilene - January 29th, 2010 8:14 pm
Rule by the Rich
Courtesy of PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS at CounterPunch
The election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama’s administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.
But what can Obama do other then spout more rhetoric?
The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of "globalism" has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.
Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.
The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.
Now that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have overturned decades of U.S. law and given corporations the ability to buy every American election, Democrats and Republicans can be nothing but pawns for a plutocracy.
Most Americans are hard pressed, but the corporations have only begun to milk them.
Wars are too profitable for the armaments industry to ever end. High unemployment is now a permanent state in the U.S., thus coercing job seekers into military service.
The security industry profits from the police state and regards civil liberties as a hindrance to profits. By announcing that he intends to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention, a violation of the Constitution and U.S. legal procedures, Obama has granted the Democratic Party’s consent to the Republicans’ destruction of habeas corpus, the main bastion of individual liberty.
Jobs offshoring is too profitable for U.S. corporations for Obama to be able to save American jobs and restart the broken economy.
Americans are…
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Olbermann on Supreme Court Campaign Finance
by ilene - January 23rd, 2010 11:13 pm
Any thoughts on this, anyone? – Ilene
Olbermann on Supreme Court Campaign Finance
Via Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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Supreme Court Ruling Guts Campaign Finance Law, “Threatens to Undermine the Integrity of Elected Institutions Around the Nation”
by ilene - January 22nd, 2010 4:04 am
Supreme Court Ruling Guts Campaign Finance Law, "Threatens to Undermine the Integrity of Elected Institutions Around the Nation"
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
The long-awaited Supreme Court decision striking down most campaign finance laws - Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – happened today.
One of the dissenting Supreme Court Justices, John Paul Stevens, wrote:
The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.
Stevens also said that the court reached to expand beyond the scope of the case. In other words, the court acted for political reasons, not judicial reasons:
Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.
This is a gigantic change, and you will see mammoth corporations – including the giant banks who have received trillions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, guarantees and other perks – inundating the airwaves with campaign blitzes to make sure that "loyal" politicians are elected.
Just watch: money which was taken from our pockets to "bail out" the too big to fails will be used to make sure that tame corporate mouthpieces are put into office.
Note: The decision also allows unions to go wild with buying campaign ads. But given that the too big to fails have unlimited access to the spigot of funds at the public trough, they will be able to outspend unions by many orders of magnitude.
Yes, I know that the giant banks have already bought and paid for Congress and the White House. See this, this and this. The Citizens United decision will just make it cheaper and easier to buy elections.
For other horrible recent Supreme Court decisions, see this and this.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site